Abstract : The majority of aircraft crash accidents involve ignition of the fuselage due to a burning external jet fuel fire. Because of this, occupant fatalities become heavily reliant upon the aircraft body remaining intact as exterior fire impinges upon it. To increase survivability, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has developed a medium-scale laboratory test to analyze the burnthrough resistance of aircraft skin components using an impinging jet flame from an oil burner to simulate a real world fire condition. Over the years, the procedure has been forcibly refined due to inconsistent results among participating laboratories for instabilities in the jet flame. Although not an FAA testing goal, the test procedure also makes analysis of material off-gasses difficult due to comingling of both the oil burner and aircraft skin combustion flames. Since aircraft construction has transitioned largely to composite materials in recent years, an understanding of burnthrough resistance and fire behavior for these new materials has not been well documented in the open literature. In response, the Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) Fire Research Group (RXQD) is developing high heat flux burner technology to replace the FAA oil burner to provide easier set-up, greater consistency, and simplicity in analyzing results for the pyrolysis of advanced composite materials. The overall objective is to use computational tools to design and analyze the performance of a plasma air torch and infrared emitter bank relying on core convective and radiant heat transfer technology, respectively. Successful validation of these models will lead to the development of computational tools that will help predict the onset of pyrolysis under multiple heat stress configurations. Successful experimental validation of these models will ultimately help develop safer, advanced materials